INTERNET ON MODERN YOUTH

The content of the current media culture is often blind to a young person’s cultural,

economic and educational background. The concept of a media culture has evolved

owing to the increased volume, variety and importance of mediated signs and messages

and the interplay of interlaced meanings. In the world of young people, the

media are saturated by popular culture and penetrate politics, the economy, leisure

time and education. At present, the global media culture is a pedagogic force that has

the potential to exceed the achievements of institutionalized forms of education. As

Henry Giroux puts it:

“With the rise of new media technologies and the global reach of the

highly concentrated culture industries, the scope and impact of the

educational force of culture in shaping and refiguring all aspects of

daily life appear unprecedented. Yet the current debates have generally

ignored the powerful pedagogical influence of popular culture,

along with the implications it has for shaping curricula, questioning

notions of high-status knowledge, and redefining the relationship

between the culture of schooling and the cultures of everyday life.” 6

The concept of media culture encompasses not simply symbolic combinations

of immaterial signs or capricious currents of old and new meanings, but an entire way

of life7 in which images, signs, texts and other audio-visual representations are connected

with the real fabric of material realities, symbols and artificialities.8

Media culture is pervasive; its messages are an important part of the everyday

lives of young people, and their daily activities are structured around media use. The

stories and images in the media become important tools for identity construction. A

pop star provides a model for clothing and other style choices, and language used by

a cartoon character becomes a key factor in the street credibility of young people.

Under the present circumstances, there are few places left in the world where one

might escape the messages and meanings embedded in the televised media culture.

In a mediated culture, it can be difficult for young people to discern whose

representations

are closest to the truth, which representations to believe, and which

images matter. This is partly because the emergence of digitalized communication and

the commoditization of culture have significantly altered the conditions under which

life and culture are experienced. Many are still attached to the romantic image of

organic communities in which people converse with one another face-to-face and live

in a close-knit local environment. Digital communication is gradually undermining this

traditional approach:

“Most of the ways in which we make meanings, most of our communications

to other people, are not directly human and expressive, but

interactions in one way or another worked through commodities and

commodity relations: TV, radio, film, magazines, music, commercial

dance, style, fashion, commercial leisure venues. These are major

realignments.” 9

In the world of young people, the media culture may be characterized primarily

in terms of three distinct considerations. First, it is produced and reproduced by

diverse ICT sources. It is therefore imperative to replace the teaching of knowledge

and skills central to agrarian and industrial societies with education in digital literacy.

A similar point is made by Douglas Kellner, who contends that in a media culture it is

important to learn multiple ways of interacting with social reality.10 Children and young

people must be provided with opportunities to acquire skills in multiple literacies to

enable them to develop their identities, social relationships and communities, whether

material, virtual, or a combination of the two.

Second, the media culture of youth extends beyond signs and symbols, manifesting

itself in young people’s physical appearance and movements. The media culture

influence is visible in how youth present themselves to the world through means

made available by prevailing fashions; the body is a sign that can be used effectively

to produce a cultural identity. Furthermore, various kinds of media-transmitted skills

and knowledge are stored and translated into movements of the body. This is evident

in a number of youth subcultures involving certain popular sports, games and

music/dances such as street basketball, skateboarding and hip hop.

The body is highly susceptible to different contextual forms of control. While

they are in school, pupils’ movements are regulated by certain control mechanisms

and cognitive knowledge. In the streets, youth clubs and private spaces, however, their

bodies function according to a different logic. Informal knowledge absorbed through

the media culture requires some conscious memorizing but also involves physical

learning, quite often commercialized.11

Third, in the experience of young people, media culture represents a source

of pleasure and relative autonomy compared with home or school. As P. Willis states:

“Informal cultural practices are undertaken because of the pleasures

and satisfactions they bring, including a fuller and more rounded

sense of the self, of ‘really being yourself’ within your own knowable

cultural world. This entails finding better fits than the institutionally or

ideologically offered ones, between the collective and cultural senses

—the way it walks, talks, moves, dances, expresses, displays—

and its actual conditions of existence; finding a way of ‘being

in the world’ with style at school, at work, in the street.” 12

Experts on young people have long appreciated the complexity of the concept

of youth, especially when examined from a global perspective. The best summation is

perhaps that the concept of youth today is historically and contextually conditioned;

in other words, it is relative as well as socially and culturally constructed.13 In the

present

media culture, the age at which childhood is perceived to end is declining, and the

period of youth seems to be extending upward.

It is useful, however, to recall that the majority of young people in the world

do not live according to the Western conceptions of youth. For them, childhood and

adolescence in the Western sense exist only indirectly through media presentations.

The same media culture influences seem to be in effect outside the Western world,

but their consequences are likely to be somewhat different owing mainly to variations

in definitions of childhood and youth and to the different authority relationships

prevailing in individual cultures.

Children and young people are often seen as innocent victims of the pervasive and

powerful media. In the extreme view, the breakdown of the nuclear family, teenage

pregnancy, venereal disease, paedophilia, child trafficking and child prostitution

spreading through the Internet, drug use, juvenile crime, the degeneration of manners,

suicide and religious cults are all seen as problems exacerbated or even inflicted upon

society by the media. Parents seem to have become disconnected from their children’s

education. Schools have been transformed into teaching factories incapable of

providing young people with the coping skills they need to survive and thrive in the

media culture.14 The media, especially television, present material that disturbs children

and makes them passive, because they have not yet reached a stage of development

that allows them to appropriately process the information they are receiving.

From this perspective, children and young people are seen as tractable recipients of

messages, as spellbound viewers susceptible to a range of addictions.

An even clearer manifestation of such pessimism is “media panic”, which

describes the concern, worry or fear that arises from the use of new devices or the

adoption of new cultural forms by children and teenagers during a period in which they

are challenging earlier cultural practices and conceptions. It is useful to remember

that, years ago, the spread of the cinema to a wider audience unleashed a panic and

inspired a wave of research intended to provide empirical proof of the destructive

effects of motion picture viewing. Another panic emerged in the early 1950s in the

United States (and in the following decade elsewhere) when the television became a

standard feature in many homes. The third media panic—focused on the detrimental

nature of ICT—is occurring now. A sad fact about media panics is that they rarely

evoke questions about what might be called pr however, that these panics are becoming

less fierce in nature as social reality becomes

increasingly pluralistic with regard to ethnic foundations, gender codes and cultural

meanings.15 The dystopic view inspires remedial action, including the creation of rules

for dealing with the problems of networked societies and the globalizing world, but it

also functions to construct a demonized image of youth.

At the other end of the spectrum, children and young people are seen as

those who stand to benefit most from the ICT revolution, as characterized by David

Buckingham:

conclusion:

In his opinion, most schools in developing countries and many in the developed

countries function primarily as storehouses for children and youth. In the global

assessment, schools display tremendous variation with regard to teachers’ qualifications

and other resources. Schools have failed to adopt the type of pedagogical thinking

required in the Internet era, based on the old idea of learning to learn: “What is

really required is the skill to decide what to look for, how to retrieve it, how to process

it, and how to use it for the specific task that prompted the search for information.”

Owing to the miserable state of schools, the task of preparing young people for the

new era is left to the home, a fact that is likely to add further to the disparities in the

knowledge, skills and attitudes of children and young people.

The introduction of ICT is linked to a number of practical problems that are

especially relevant in the poorest areas of the world. One primary concern is the lack

of money and ICT resources. Most agree that a significant increase in development aid

is needed. A second concern is that the newest ICT applications are far too expensive

from the perspective of developing countries. One solution that has been suggested is

to use freeware and to develop devices that are sufficient for the needs of users but

do not represent the newest or fastest technologies.